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Rainbow 0.4: Async Goodness

Version 0.4 of Rainbow is now available on addons.mozilla.org: Go grab it.

To start with, we’d like to thank you for all the great feedback! Yesterday, Dan Mosedale blogged about a web-based Karaoke application in which he mentions the importance of a tight feedback loop for the evolution of any API. We’ve also received very useful comments from other folks who are using Rainbow for their projects, which include but are not limited to: a QR code scanner, a ‘webcasting’ application using chromeless and a photo booth for the web. In this release, we’ve incorporated many of your suggestions:

What’s new?

The biggest change is that the Rainbow API is now completely asynchronous. This means you will have to update your code to work with the new API; take a look at the new examples and the README to learn more.

Error reporting is now much more robust. Hardware errors and other conditions will be reported your JavaScript via an asynchronous observer.

It is now possible to preview video as a separate step from recording.

We added an API call to take a snapshot of a live video as a PNG image.

What’s next?

We’re going to be focused on getting Rainbow to run reliably on Linux, as well as continue working on efforts to bring video streaming to the browser.

We can’t wait to see what you can build with this release of Rainbow. Please do keep sending in your feedback on our discussion forum!

@anantn is a hacker at Mozilla Labs who specializes in generalism. He has previously worked on the Weave, Jetpack, and Account Manager projects and is currently fiddling with Open Web Apps and Real-time communication for the Web.